chipotle | Karma, good and neutral (Reply)

At lunch today I met, by happenstance, coworkers from the job I tried to take last year, the one that was supposed to involve technical writing and web development and project analysis and mostly really involved being a kind of office admin, which is not my strong suit. (As I think I observed then, the obvious glee the guy I was replacing had in “retiring” — basically quitting to go back to school at 50 — should have told me more than I let it.) It sounds like they did get someone to try for that position, who was “there for a few months” and then let go when his position lost his funding. In other words, there’s a pretty good chance that even if I’d stayed there, I’d have lost the job anyway — instead of ending up at a place that actually does want me to be a web developer and technical writer.

Funny how things work that way on occasion.

As I write this, nobody’s home and I’m considering dinner. I’ve lately been feeling faintly paranoid about my “habit” of eating before the housemates are ready to, but I rarely eat breakfast, which means I usually leave to get lunch at 11:00–11:30. So I’m ready for dinner at 7:00 and really damn hungry by 8:00. I don’t want to be antisocial, but the tradition here of looking at one another around 9:30 and saying, “We should think about food before things close” isn’t something I can always manage. (And since I need to be in bed by midnight, eating at 10:00 tends to be something I pay for.)

The “in bed by midnight” thing is something else I wonder about myself now, though. I used to be able to keep college student hours, but looking back, by the time I was at Intermedia I really didn’t. I was in bed by, well, midnight. That only meant six and a half hours of sleep. Being around people who are apparently perfectly comfortable staying up ’til two or three in the morning and still getting up about the same time I do makes me feel much older than it probably should. I suspect I actually am the oldest in the house, but not by that much.

Well. Now it’s past eight, so I think I’m going to load the walker into the station wagon and drive real slow to a buffet, with my left turn signal on the whole way…